On The Blessedness Of The Absurd

A homily for the New Moon on March 18, 2026. Written, as always, without authority.

Dearly Beloved,

Blessed New Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and the name of the Divine on this, the New Moon in (double) Pisces.

Hell of a two weeks, huh?

I don’t mean to make light of the current state of the world, but what else can you do in moments like these except take refuge in the heart of the absurd? And I mean that in the Kierkegaardian sense of the absurd, the sense of the absurd that takes Isaac to the mountain to be murdered while always believing that the divine promise will still be fulfilled through Isaac. The sense of the absurd that says in the face of near-certain annihilation that I will sing anyway. The sense of the absurd that says that sometimes you hear the best jokes at a funeral.

I want to talk about the absurd today, because right now the absurd is the only thing that makes sense to me.

First, let’s talk about the name of my blog. Why do I, a person who has been in the magick biz for most of my life, who holds grades and has taught others, who is an ordained priestess, and who is the leader of an active and growing occult organization, a person who clearly possesses multiple forms of authority, constantly refer to myself and my work as being “without authority”? What does this phrase mean to me?

It means that the idea that any of this bullshit I say or do means anything is absurd. It means that my very sincerity, my dedication to the gods, to the Great Work, and to seeking and serving the Good, lives in me alongside an endless sense of ironic distance from myself. I have to live with the daily strangeness that is me. I’m a fool who has spent her life tilting at windmills and chasing butterflies and I spend a good part of every day just laughing at myself. I simply cannot take my own seriousness seriously. I’m all the more ridiculous exactly because I’m so sincere. I’m all the more silly exactly because I keep trying to live my life in earnest in a world like this. I’m endlessly trying to play my scenes straight when the script calls for a pie in the face.

And that makes me ridiculous.

I am an echo with no original, a constantly collapsing contradiction, an irreparable rupture between being and becoming. I am endlessly broken and endlessly repaired, endlessly healing and endlessly wounded. That is my nature.

Yet I want to live. I want all of you to live. I want to embrace, nurture, and defend the world with all I have and all I am, in life’s name and for life’s sake. I want to share my life with my wife, with my family, and with all of you, dear ones. I want to do right by the world and the people in it. I even want to do right by the very same people who want to harm me and people like me.

See? I’m ridiculous.

And I’m addicted to meaning. I either find it everywhere or I make it everywhere (and who knows which is which?). It’s funny how meaning works. It’s a lot like initiation in that it is participative. It’s an open door, a call to adventure, an invitation to a party where anything could happen. Meaning leads you into the unknown and requires you to engage in earnest, even though it can’t really make you any promises. Meaning asks you to go out alone into the depths with only a rough map and then find your own way back home, all on a vague promise of something more. Something that justifies—waves hands at the world—all of this.

That’s why mages are so idiosyncratic and why there are so many different traditions. The depths are vast and mighty and there are so many paths to choose. So many mysteries to discover and adventures to be had that, by the time you make your way back to someplace you recognize, it doesn’t recognize you. You aren’t really the same person, so it’s not really the same place. At least not for you.

That’s why it’s all so absurd. Why we are all strangers in such a very strange land. Because we are never really walking the same road. It may look the same, it may even feel the same sometimes, but we are different every time we walk it. Kierkegaard famously wondered whether repetition is possible and I don’t think it is. I think we are endlessly new creatures in an endlessly new world.

That’s why it’s all so tragic. That’s why the world keeps breaking my heart. We could do it all differently at any moment and we just keep doing the same old stupid shit. We could all just shake the Long Night off like a nightmare and say “Oh, what a strange dream that was!”. We could be free and alive and loving any time. All of this is a long play, an improvised pantomime called “history”, and none of it really has to be this way or that way or any particular way at all. We are always free—wildly, terrifyingly free—to do something different.

We could be happy tomorrow.

First there was an explosion, a “big bang” that rang out as becoming finally became. Then there was expanding space and coiling time and slowly cooling starstuff. And out of that starstuff came us. That’s what really happened. That’s what is really happening. Being is becoming. Light is transforming into life. Stars move through their paths in the company of stars, all the way down and all the way up. The rest of it is just a story, and we could tell a different story any time we want to.

It all just makes me want to cry. Or laugh. Or maybe scream. Sometimes I think terrible things and then I shake myself awake like I was another person for a moment. But I know it’s all just me.

Maybe someday there will be another explosion, a great reckoning, a moment where being will become something else. Maybe not. All we can count on in the world, all we can truly know for sure, is that we will never understand. Everything we do, every story we tell about it, every myth and model and theory, will always be a lamp lit against the darkness, a secret crush revealed in the hush between battles, a joke told on a life raft a thousand miles out at sea. It will always be absurd. Anything we can ever say about any of it will always be, ultimately and finally, without authority.

Blessed New Moon, dear ones. May the gods bless you until we speak again on the Equinox. Despite it all, I remain…

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Odilon Redon, “Initiation To Study”, (1905)